Reddit is like the restaurant you've been going to for several years that was a mom & pop operation with awesome food and atmosphere. It got popular, and the owners made it a chain, so you could get the same food in a lot of different areas. The quality started to go down as they expanded, but it was already very popular. Then the owners started raising the prices, and the atmosphere started to get way less awesome. At some point, you realized that it's not the restaurant you fell in love with, and it wasn't a good value anymore, so you started looking for a similar kind of restaurant that was more like that one was early on. But the chain is still really popular, and a lot of people just keep going because it's what they're familiar with and they know the menu - they don't want to go to the work of finding a new place and they're content with what they're getting there. The people who have left are a drop in the bucket so far, and the chain restaurant is likely to continue operating for the foreseeable future.
I remember almost everyone use facebook at a time, even chinese use facebook before it was walled off in china. But then everyone got angry because facebook got worse and anti-user and some deleted account. Yet, facebook is still kicking
In a nutshell, the communities move on to a more culturally and technologically suitable perform
Life is short, it is wise fast track to Acceptance for five stages of grief. The best punishment for Reddit admins is to be forgotten
Facebook is still kicking but they had to buy Instagram because they were bleeding users to it like crazy. They're not declining in usage because the Internet (number of connected people) is still growing, but their user growth has slowed down significantly, to the point where they had a quarter with a decline in daily active users. That's bad for a platform like that, and their stock price has reflected that.
Reddit is unsalvageable and had been for a long time, but again, you are not going to be able to take the redditor out of people even if they move somewhere else for a long time.
None of us should be trying to build a better reddit here, we should be aiming to build something new, knowing what works and what doesn't from our time as redditors.
The farther this goes, the more I think you may be right about Reddit being unsalvagable.
I think with different ownership, things could have worked out very differently. But the current shareholders and board obviously don't care much that their property has gone from one of the most liked and trusted sites on the Internet to one of the most publicly hated in like 3 weeks. They think this will make them money otherwise they'd have reined Spez in or fired him.
More importantly, I think this sort of thing can happen with ANY non-federated platform. As long as the users aren't the ones ultimately in charge, it can and probably will eventually happen.
Reddit Is Fun is one of the apps being killed off next week. Their subreddit was marking each post with which stage of grief it was. A lot of anger and Bargaining.
Albeit a bit of a stretch, the death of a website can elicit a sense of loss that draws parallels to actual literal death. At least in a "stepping on a lego and getting shot in the foot both really hurt" kind of way. Different intensity, similar flavor.
The arrow of enshitification flys in one direction only. the people that are still there will migrate out eventually. spez was right when he said the majority of users don’t care about the api, but fails to realize that the majority of users don’t generate content. The users that do generate content are jumping ship.
Yeah, the majority of users don't care about the API because they don't know what it means - that it's the interface that enables not just third party apps, but also moderation tools.
The same users that will tell you that they don't care about the API will start whining when the moderation of their favorite subs turn to shit, when they get overrun by trolls and spammers and bots and advertising.
To me the enshitification is the real reason I'm here. The API changes are just the catalyst. At the end of the day I think the protests with a goal of enacting change at reddit is kinda silly. They are free to run their business poorly, whatever. I do support the protests but for my own reasons because I want to see reddit fail and a new evolution of the medium to arise. Reddit will continue to get shittier, let's convince people to move elsewhere.
Because of what is WAS. While it still remains a bastion of information and data, for me Reddit has went WAY beyond a social media that I'll use. I was already done when they decided not to reconsider their API decision - I could have been swayed, too. Companies deserve to get paid for their data and service; but not price-gouging rates like Reddit is attempting.
It really sucks, too - I loved what Reddit, and its USERS, provided to the userbase... when I heard about mgmt planning to forcefully take back BLACKOUT sub-reddits, tho; that was it. NO ONE should remain there - I don't understand how anyone could - federation is the only way forward, aside from going back to a website for every 'sub-reddit'... Lemmy and LemmyNet should, as they are, really take hold right now.
The devs need to find more help; I hate to say this, but theres money there.
NO REDDIT, NO MORE.
MORE Social, less Media.
I had hope until yesterday. I was a mod and all my users turned on me and said some really hurtful things. I'm gonna give a mod position to someone else on a smaller sub I'm a part of or two and step down from the rest. I'm guessing I'll still lurk, but I'm done with it.
One of my favorite subs went aggressively pro-shill. Not just "you did your best". But nothing except contempt and endless mockery.
I would say it's astroturfing. But previously a gaming sub had gone dark for a mere 24 hours as a statement about toxicity and the response was similar.
There's definitely some hardcore shilling and astroturfing in a lot of subs where blackouts and John Oliver memes have become the norm. People with no posting history, brand new accounts and low karma accounts have flooded in to insult the mods and attack the protest.
I have zero hope for Reddit. I had no idea there were much better 3rd party apps available for Reddit on phones, so the API changes don't impact me. But I've noticed over the years more and more, astro turfing by bots, bots reposting popular things to karma farm, as to sell the bot to entities looking to influence reddit via the aforementioned astro turfing.
It's all very gross, I started to feel like a duck sitting in a pond surrounded by ducks, but not really, they're all decoys, fakes, mean to give the impression of a big crowd. I don't like that trend, and on top of that, the idea of Reddit going public, and trying to push our content as their value makes me sick. The owners of reddit haven't done the heavy lifting, we the users, the mods all did the work and built up content. The idea that some chucklefuck was going to profit big from our effort isn't something I want to be part of any more. So here I am, and I gotta say, Lemmy feels like a 2000's forum by comparison, and I hope its very nature makes it harder to fall into the same pit falls as reddit and digg did.
I don't have any hope for reddit, but unfortunately, it is stil a very good source of information. Plus some previously established communities cannot be easily replaced, so reddit still has a use for me.
I hope that with time, my old communities will find their way here. Until then, sometimes I need to use reddit to talk to some people and access information.
And this is what makes the whole situation so shitty. All of the popular social media sites suck, but it's not easy to replace them with something new when the majority of the content and community stays there.
Kind of the way (at least for me), I still have a FB account since there are still old friends or relatives that would be impossible to reach otherwise. So it just sits there, on life-support, unless I need it.
Twitter has been slowly turning that way, and now Reddit will work the same for me, but it'll take a while.
I had hope until the infamous AMA posted by spez, and him doubling down on accusing people of blackmail. I've purged my account history immediately after that.
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
The complexity of "servers" (don't get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
Lack of content
Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
Lemmy is buggy and unresponsive for you? Huh. For me it's both way more responsive and not buggy at all, kinda why I decided to give it a shot, instead of dropping social media all together...
The server thing isn't that bad, just go to lemmy.world and make an account, really not that difficult.
And the lack of content and people is because people started caring about lemmy like a week ago...
Compare to old [dot] reddit [dot] com? Yes, a thousand times yes! When clicking on "Reply" or "Post" I see spinning a spinning wheels for ~30s. Sometimes, I'm looking at the front page of a community, and new posts rush in over the websocket from different communities. It looks like the websocket updates are absurdly buggy.
If you're comparing the reddit's redesign, I guess lemmy is about as responsive/buggy.
The server thing isn’t that bad
Because you're a technical user. For the average user, it's convoluted and unnecessary. (Again, I'm a huge fediverse supporter, it has to be this way, but I have to admit it's not user friendly.)
The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
I'll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won't become an issue. But I might be utopian.
Denial, at least for me. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that anyone could be that stupid and eager to destroy it’s most active part of the user base…
And the fact that it’s Reddit, a Site I always preceived as community driven and kinda above those corporate shenanigans, I still have hopes some saner heads might prevail. Although that seems increasingly unlikely by the minute…
The overwhelming majority of Redditors probably don't really know what the actual issue is, and on the surface, Reddit charging for an API that they've allowed free access to for years probably seems logical. Plus, people are creatures of habit, they'd rather go back to the same website they've been visiting, with the community that they already know, than try to figure out what the heck a Lemmy is.
Do you think there would be use in having a site like upstract.com (the new popurls) that would aggregate the RSS feeds from all Lemmys and people could just browse through popular somewhat curated posts of the day?
I feel like there would definitely be people who would enjoy something similar for Lemmy. I think with the federated nature of Lemmy, 3rd party tools are going to be crucial when it comes to widespread adoption, as I feel like they're going to play a huge role in abstracting the confusing, nerdy parts of federation away from the general public.
I wouldn't be so sure. In multiple subreddits the communities voted to destroy the sub in response of the admins trying to break the blackout (e.g. pics only allowing pics of John Oliver looking sexy, and several subs pulling similar moves).
I would mildly argue that might be a good thing. The Masses [TM] are what changed reddit from interesting discourse to shitposting trolls. If everybody came here, it would just be more of the same.
So there aren't a lot of people here. But the people who are here make the atmosphere we love. We want more lemmy, with all the open talking. Not beehaw, where apparently they want to remain in a vacuum. They can't exactly, since that's evidently not how defederation works, but they want to. They might as well just go back to reddit.
Keep in mind, this is all my take on what's happening. I'm not completely sure I understand federation and how it works.
They don't see their niche interest groups migrating to a different platform.
Smaller subs may have had just enough critical mass when accessing the entire reddit user graf, but new platforms are not there yet.
It is much easier to gain traction in a unified user base than in a federation of disparate user bases.
Yeah, that was it for me, I deleted my old 10+ year old user, who was a moderator, I might come back with a smaller account, but rewrote and deleted all my old stuff, the thing is there is really hard to find something for some of my really niche interests :/
I completely agree, and I think another major factor is a function of when you started using Reddit.
I've noticed a trend that many of the people who've moved on from Reddit (or at least the ones who are posting here and in places like Hacker News) joined Reddit 8+ years ago.
I started using Reddit about 14 years ago, and I've definitely noticed a change in the overall vibe of Reddit over those years. There were obvious changes (like cracking down/banning specific subreddits) and there were more subtle changes (like communities growing so large that the comments turned to shit) and there was a departure from a text-heavy, original-content focused haven for like-minded people to a feed full of gifs and inflammatory comment (not to mention ads-that-are-pretending-to-be-posts).
People who have been using it for so many years notice this change, but it was so gradual and over so long a time that they were used to it -- essentially the change was slow enough that we were lulled into accepting the new reality of Reddit.
But then this whole kerfuffle has shaken us out of it and made us realize that it's only going to get worse. So here we are, onto greener pastures.
Now, on the other hand, we have the (many, many) people who started using Reddit more recently. They only know the "new" Reddit. And so they don't get what the big deal is. They think the mods are throwing a fit and the power users are just whiny and "why the hell can't I see my memes?".
As a fairly 'new' user of Reddit, I think you're pretty spot on.
I've been using Reddit for around 5 years or so now (and their mobile app, I know, burn me right now) and as you said, for users like me, it's not that obvious how much Reddit has changed for the worst. Sure, a few things were changed for the worst, but compared to other social medias, Reddit still seemed like the better option to me.
The think is, this protest has shed light on a lot of issues I ignored, and the way Reddit Corp. has handled it just straight up made me sick and wanting to dissosiate myself from Reddit as a whole. But I've a strong political background, strong beliefs and I am french so.. I'm clearly not the 'common user'.
Those, I get why they see the protest as an inconveniance at best, and just want to keep using the website conveniantly as they usually do. They don't know about 3rd Party Apps, they don't care about useful bots, they don't understand forums and old internet culture. They just want their daily dose of content.
EDIT: Also my very first comment on Lemmy, as I'm trying to fly away from Reddit.
I think this really hits the spot.
Corporate and Gov can eat people liberties step by step as long as they don't touch their wallet and really few people will react.
You're on the Fediverse where the more "extreme" people moving away from Reddit are. Hence, there is a strong bias toward experiencing the Reddit fiasco in a way that makes one think, that it's already a sinking ship. For many, Lemmy isn't as easily useable and mature as Reddit is.
I'm of the opinion that Reddit will become incrementally worse going forward, most users are not bothered right now because the whole API fiasco affects mods and not them, but as usual they miss the forest for the tree. The site will go for the users and creators next, but it won't be like this, it'll be one tiny annoying feature at a time to avoid mass abandonment. I'm already looking for alternatives, such as this one, in preparation, but most will put up with anything just to keep consuming the same old content.
I don't even think it needs to go for users and creators next; making moderation harder will have plenty of impact on its own. Many people seem to think mods randomly remove crap in some weird power trip. The reality is most are busy removing spam, abuse, shitposts, and the 5th submission of the same news link that's still on the front page. Once unpaid mods start leaving they'll have to implement automods that'll just suck as they always do. The quality of every sub is going to go to hell pretty quickly.
There are more potentially interesting websites than I have time to spend. I'm taking the same attitude to Reddit that I take for StackOverflow and Wikipedia. I'll read their content, especially if it comes up in search, but I'm not wading through the cesspool to try and contribute anything.
I disagree with twitter, I wanted to continue using it despite the issues but the tweets and replies I was seeing was such a drop in quality that it naturally phased out of my routine, which I've from others in person that felt the same.
Reddit is a sharper change for us, twitter kind of just declined out of being worthwile.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don't care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person... Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
Don’t underestimate how much resistance to change stops people from looking beyond the status quo. Moving away from Reddit is a clear example. I suspect a lot of lurkers from Reddit are actually from the category of Late Majority or Laggards
Eh, I know about the alternatives and they're all clunky messes that will probably never have anywhere near the same userbase as reddit. Even if they do, they won't function the same way.
I don't mind Lemmy, and if Reddit continues to shit the bed I'll probably switch over fully, but I would much much prefer that Spez backtrack on all the recent garbage and just have stuff go back to business as usual.
I like having all my content aggregated to one space. A big selling point of lemmy and other federated systems is that they're "more free", but until a month ago everything was fine. I don't need or want to shake the foundations of how people consume media, I just need one guy to stop being a dickhead for 30 seconds.
Most of the subreddits I used to frequent (particularly/r/manga) haven't made the move to anywhere, nor they blacked out in protest. While I see some parallels here, there's still very few active users.
I would love to be able to post more content myself, but I objectively do not have enough time in my hands.
I follow some pretty niche topics, and have had to make an executive decision regarding indifferent behavior from those who moderate discussions in those areas: Talking about a specific crypto, or a style of painting takes a backseat to my politics.
This was the final straw for me, and I feel that a collective lack of participation is the only recourse to assist those who are indifferent in generating an opinion.
Not only that, but I extracted (and continuously delete when they reappear) my contributions to those discussions, reposting them elsewhere.
In addition to few active users, there's a lot of duplication when it comes to Lemmy communities. For example, there are at least 15 Linux communities across the various Lemmy instances - and that's just general Linux communities. There are four coffee communities, four libertarian communities, three retro gaming communities, five general Windows communities, etc.
The best we can do as users is to only join communities with the most users and maybe ask moderators to delete their community if there's already one with more users and if theirs has very few, if any, posts. It would be really great if it were possible to merge communities, especially ones with few posts. I guess the ones with few users and zero posts could have the moderator tell subscribers the community will be shutting down soon and they should locate other instances with the browse.feddit.de search tool.
Though, I do have to admit that there is an advantage to having duplicate communities across instances, which is that they make it easier for new users, since it prevents them from having to figure out how to get to other communities too soon. Though, every instance should probably have a sticky or something that tells users about browse.feddit.de and browser extensions like Lemmy Link.
Personally, I just feel bad for Apollo's creator and mods (the good ones) who spent so much time carefully taking care of a community they love, so in a sense I wish Reddit would come to their senses and axe that fucker CEO and revert to reasonable API changes. But it's mostly wishful thinking. Besides, now I would feel bad if Reddit managed to go back to being good because that would mean that this aswesome Lemmy thinghy would go back into the shadows, while it deserves so much attention imho.
I'm not saying that they don't love the community, but it was probably also a lucrative opportunity for the developers too. I bought paid versions of a few, and found Boost to be my favorite. I wish they would head over here because people would definitely support them.
Oh yes, the dude is set for life for sure. I was talking more about how he might feel. Hell, he might not give a shit but if I were him I would be devastated seeing all my effort going down the drain. But yes, financially the guy has probably nothing to worry about lol
You are right, and the fact federation is perhaps overplayed or emphasized when talking about something like Lemmy doesn't help.
The regular users don't care, as long as the content is available. Which unfortunately isn't quite the case yet (with no disrespect to developers, I think Lemmy is something I'll stick to for a good while)
Its the sane reason people still play old mmos. Theyve already sunk so much time into it and they are used to it, its were their community is and something new is uncomfortabke and scary.
Nah, we still play because we like them. I play oldschool Runescape because I can't stand Runescape 3. It has nothing to do with 3 being scary, I just prefer the mechanics of the old school version.
Here's one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.
Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the "landed gentry" comment Reddit's CEO was referring to.
The irony that u/spez and others keep using landed gentry in the wrong way is hilarious.
Landed gentry bought their "title" (it's not really a title, more a socio-political category). The first scenario you described, with someone buying the position of moderator... that's 100% landed gentry. Commoners with wealth would buy a big house and property and then be considered landed gentry. It's not something that was given to them like peerage (aka nobility).
The reality is that content producers and moderators are closer to cotters--somewhere in between serfs and husbandmen. They don't own the land (e.g.: subs), but they work it. The only difference is that serfs and husbandmen could derive a profit from their labour, whereas most mods and content producers don't (as far as I'm aware).
If we keep going with the middle-age titles, u/spez is much closer to a "lord of the manor" than he would care to realise. He owns the land, can choose who works it and who is able to make a profit and how much. He can withdraw that permission at any time, and he amasses vast amounts of wealth based on the work of the people who, effectively, work for him for free.
The Reddit CEO needs to learn that the people who moderate his website for free and the users who use it are what makes it valuable, not whatever value he thinks he provides. The landed gentry comment was out of pocket because he assumes we owe him anything - makes stupid decisions as a business, get less than ideal outcomes.
Because the content that people dump into it for years and communities are valuable. May be if some of those communities migrated to lemmy and I just keep accessing contents from way back machine, then I may not want Reddit anymore, but at the moment. I wish for it's redemption
I get a "sunk-cost fallacy" feel from it. Like Bill Hicks' bit went- This HAS to be real. Look at my furrows of worry- look at all this Karma. This has to be real!"
Why? Because the whole reason reddit is even worth visiting is the posters.
Sure, the people in charge of the whole infrastructure that supports the act of posting and reading posts are making destructive "business decisions", but until now they've largely been basically a bunch of invisible, nameless, inconsequential people as long as the proverbial lights stayed on for my ten years on reddit. They were technically in charge of stuff, but any time there was drama around reddit employees themselves, I had to go to places like /r/outoftheloop or /r/ELI5 in order to figure out what in the actual heck the inexplicable hubub was all about.
To me, that means they're NOT what reddit is, they're just the people who make it possible.
The folks who do lights and sound at a stage play are necessary for the play to function at that particular theater, but if they were the only ones doing anything there, noone would show up and stick around.
Inertia is a horrible thing. It took a LONG time for most of the niche communities on reddit to get "established" enough to have semi-regular content. Inertia being what it is, it will likely take quite a while for the same to happen here and it won't be exactly the same thing. It may be better and worse in some ways, but it WILL be different and some of us were quite comfortable with what we had. So, yeah, hope, because losing something you like and care about, watching it get gutted, wrecked, hobbled, and ruined is not inspiring or fun.
That being said, I'm seeing very encouraging things happening here so far, so this might become my new home.
For people who were more than just the causal browser/lurker, Reddit was an amazing place to not only obtain information about very specific things, but also to connect with other people. I have type 1 diabetes and the ability to connect with other type 1 diabetics to commiserate, share information, and seek help on Reddit was like nothing else anywhere else on the internet. I have a few other niche interests that also only had communities on Reddit.
Years ago, these things (health conditions, niche interests, etc) all had their own separate forums scattered throughout the internet. One forum might have a few dozen people, one might have a hundred or so. But Reddit quickly became the central place where we could connect. Whereas forums could maybe attract a few hundred people, subreddits could connect with THOUSANDS. There’s not yet been anything else like it.
Unfortunately, we made the BIG mistake of relying on a for-profit, centrally owned company to function as a town square. Same with Twitter. We found value in sharing information and connecting through these platforms, only to get screwed over by billionaire CEOs.
Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Hopefully something comparable will take Reddit’s place. It’s not going to happen over time. I never expected Mastodon to replace Twitter overnight. But slowly, very slowly, at least some people are seeing the downfall of corporate social media and will hopefully slowly switch over to federated alternatives. I don’t think it will happen quickly, nor will it happen for everything. But I do think it’s already happening. And it will happen faster if we get some good mobile apps.
The thing that was going around the rest of the internet was niche tech answers, like if you're trying to learn programming, or you have some obscure computer problem. Years and years of answers were all siloed on Reddit, text searchable, and it was indispensable. Lots of people who don't care about Reddit were in a panic during the blackout, so many people became dependent on it.
The only thing that compares is Youtube, now infamous for always having a video about it, but Youtube is obnoxious because video isn't searchable and creators generally title their posts for clicks, not subject matter. Somebody might do an informative video on obscure crucial changes in some software but it will be titled THIS WILL BE A DISASTER. You have to scrub through people's videos hoping to get the one nugget of answer you were after. Meanwhile, Reddit was like StackOverflow's side lounge, and full of the right answers.
The real question is if anybody in this community wants to become that sort of resource. I can only imagine that we're all getting sick of "if you're not paying you're the product". Over and over again, we discover that our input is worth billions and not a penny for us, not even happiness, we're the cattle, so who cares if we moo so long as we produce meat? It gets old.
I'm also hoping that this Reddit situation is the catalyst for the death of unpaid mods. That was a slapped together duck tape solution from 1998, when a web community was a prefab message board stuck on the back of some truly obscure cartoonist's site, with a community size in the hundreds. It was never supposed to be the permanent solution, but you know what they say about temporary solutions becoming permanent.
Either you're expecting nice people to mod their way through the truly horrific shit that gets posted to the average website, for free, which is odious, or you're going to attract people whose motivations are not good, so they don't care if they have to wade through some beheading videos, they've got worse ideas.
It's been one of the most unsustainable situations in the modern internet, and it's going to have to change, somehow.
I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to be free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
There is nothing inherently problematic about charging for API access, it's the fact that the price they've set is ludicrous, something like 25 cents per thousand calls when you'd expect it to be more along the lines of 4-5 dollars per million calls.
It's like someone buying a free parking garage, letting mopeds park for free, and charging cars five hundred dollars a day for parking, and then, instead of just being honest and saying "Fuck people with cars no cars allowed," saying that the car drivers are at fault for wanting to use a more full-featured vehicle that takes more space
Indeed, if the prices were reasonable this would not be a problem. I believe that the Apollo developer even said as much (or maybe it was rif's developer - or neither and I'm just imagining it) - and I have no objection to it either, the servers aren't free to run after all. But the rate the used? It's just absolutely fucking incomprehensible.
The shitty treatment of third party developers is just the unmentionable icing on this already disgusting cake.
Honestly, it's an information goldmine. You'll get answers to most obscure questions and in detail. All others sources on the internet are either fluff or endorsements. It it also inconvenient to have to visit two websites that does same thing. So people don't want to abandon what they are habituated to.
We are losing a lot, this new ActivityPup fediverse is exciting but it is like going back a decade for long-term reddit users.
Reddit obviously sucks now and has been like this for years, IMO it was newReddit and its focus on Facebook users that was the biggest event declining quality. What we had slowly eroded and its no longer there, but there were still enough smaller active communities that it could still be a good experience.
We are rebuilding and it is fun and exciting, but we are losing a big part of our lives in the process, we wont have something equal to what we lost for a couple years to come.
I agree, as someone who saw reddit evolve from r/reddit.com to what it is today, it took about 4 years for them to really get to peak old reddit with the introduction of multireddits. Other than that most of the development has been in the third party apps, and really much of that development has been updating the apps to match the evolving OS design language rather than new reddit API endpoints. But we now have the advantage of having a minimum viable product and people with years of experience building and moderating communities.
I also see this as the one's moving from Reddit have some solid principles aka won't let a greedy CEO trash his userbase so we prefer to lose a big chunk of our internet lives than to support said bastard.
I have no hope, but there are a few subs that I still love and it's sad that he is destroying that so he can make reddit like every other soul-sucking social network.
reddit is unfortunately the only place I can go to discuss random things I love like the EPL, or WNBA, or the japanese show Gaki No Tsukai as no one around me in real live is into them. Hopefully some of that can transfer to lemmy or other places...but who knows...
Some people are optimistic, which isn't a bad thing, since by leaving Reddit, they would be basically abandoning the whole account, and the identity that they had established for themselves over there.
Others either don't really care about what's going on, or have no idea. It doesn't affect them, and from their perspective, it's much ado about nothing, or just the standard batch of Reddit drama.
Others might hope that making a fuss might get picked up by the media, which is likely to make Reddit back down, and ameliorate some of their proposed changes, hence the John Oliver business, which I don't think is an accident. There's some history there, since Reddit has previously stood firm on changes, only to back down when the media got a hold of things.
I don't know man. I had hope once. Now it's gone. My favorite subs are vanishing and I can't blame them. I have signed up for here and Kbin. I was on reddit for over 8 years
Yeah, reddit's not gonna be the same anymore. Even if people still continue to post there, the damage is already done, and anyone who actually cares about the site and their communities are rightfully freaking out. It's a shame really.
They are just following the reactionary social media norms these days. The lack of proper passing of information and just humoured by the subreddit protests such as in r/pics. Some people are not actually on Reddit for information.
I don't think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don't blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren't exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic... alas, that hope is indeed slim.
Honestly: for my social media consumption Reddit works pretty well. I always used to webinterface so for nothing really changed.
I am here because I felt like changing things up more than anything. Well: the fediverse is a super interesting idea and looking at something fresh is always fun.
Still; it seems pretty likely that this place will be a good deal smaller than Reddit for the foreseeable future and that’s both a strength and a weakness.
The main strength of Reddit is it’s nichier subs. There is one for just about anything. You need a massive volume of users to do such a thing and I don’t think Lemmy will reach that size anytime soon.
I expect Lemmy to be a place where people value Openness and Freedom. Generally there are less people that care about Freedom AND Pu’er tea than there are people who care about just Pu’er tea.
I wonder what will happen to Lemmy in a couple of years🤔
As this first started unfolding and getting updates from Christian (Apollo dev) I had some hope. That faded fast and I actively started looking for open source alternatives and here we are. I have no hope for Reddit and was happy to light a few fires and delete all my content on the way out.
Some people like my bf just browse for a little bit of their communities and don‘t care about anything else.
However, if we make this place interesting enough they will come naturally, those sorts of people are like moths who are attracted to interesting content.
Because no matter how bad it gets, like all successful social platforms, it will stay successful. People will continue to use it no matter how much they complain or criticize it. I regularly complain about Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. But I still use all of them. It doesn't matter how unsatisfied people are with how things are being handled, if most people still see a reason to use it, they will until it's gone.
Facebook is nearly dead. No content there at all anymore. Only a few old people posts occasionally, and you never spot it until days later because facebook decided it was less relevant than an advertisement. A very slow death. I'm sure reddits' death gonna be even slower. It will wither away as the reddit board take more greedy and desperate actions.
This just isn't true. There are still tons and tons of young people who regularly use and comment on Facebook. Businesses, celebrities, bands, etc. all continue to get a lot of interaction from their followers. Facebook is very much alive and that won't change anytime soon.
MySpace isn't a successful social platform. It used to be, but it's been on life support for over a decade. Websites like that are just clinging on; the average person knows no one who uses it.
Because Reddit has been our online home for years. It's where our communities are, where are online friends are, it's become home. People have spent thousands of hours building communities there, as a labor of love.
Unfortunately I agree with you- the home is on fucking fire and unless a monsoon spontaneously erupts we should get the hell out before it burns to the ground.
I can only repeat what I just commented somewhere else:
I built Swift apps and Mastodon or Discord are NOT a proper format to get help, Discord being crappy for archiving, too.
I have a hard time getting help by people that really know this stuff because Swift is made by Apple, and the Apple bubble tends to stick to Twitter and the likes. If enough migrate, I can finally say frick off, Reddit
Sunk cost fallacy is my assumption, but take that with a grain of salt. I'm one of those low tech savvy old farts people talk about. I left because making it harder for moderators to do their jobs means communities that I love will be less safe and welcoming. Maybe the rest have to experience that discomfort for themselves before they too are driven away. Or they think they can ride this out and continue as before when things settle down.
This is good to see, it seems a lot of the people that were for the blackout left, now there is so much vitriol against moderators on reddit, I'm so tired, I just don't want to anymore, deleted my 10+ year old account today after telling my mod team I can't anymore, so now at least the chances are smaller that I will go back.
Just know that I for one appreciate the hell out of you. I don't have the technical skills to do what you do, and to be perfectly honest, I don't have the patience either. It amazes me that people with the skills volunteer their time to do this mostly thankless work which makes communities more enjoyable. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
The silver lining is that hopefully we can get a few people off Reddit and onto here and eventually grow these spaces. I do miss the thousands of upvotes and comments though, but that'll come in time
I just hope there's no power trippin edgelords - toxic sweaty mods here. And whoever is in charge(like a CEO) I hope is also a normal human being. All I ask from you is to work with the community not against it.
That's the fun of the Fediverse; there isn't a CEO. You're in charge if you want to be. Go setup your own instance if you find you don't like the one you're on, or find one whose admins you like. Don't like Lemmy? Go write your own activitypub software to do the same stuff!
That is easily solvable within the fediverse, contrary to reddit. In reddit you had to kinda deal with it. Here, people can simply fuck off to another instance.
I get the reddit c suite just wants to go public and finally get their payout, which is understandable but if they're out then we're out too. There's better platforms now anyway that need a reason to be used and developed. They could have so easily handled this differently by just making the reddit app experience better than any third party apps today. But here we are and honestly I wouldn't bet my retirement that teenagers will still be posting to reddit in 40 years.
It will fall, but not instantly. It would be like Facebook, little by little it would loose people. Quality would start dropping down until it's not a good site anymore.
Yeah, the entire niche industry community I was on twitter for absolutely ate it during the early days of Elon and the majority have moved on - mainly to social media spaces like Insta or TikTok.
We got some of them on Reddit, even - though that sure was a brief and shallow victory, all told.
People didn't switch from Twitter to Mastodon because Twitter was still working. You could still post your content, you still had all your followers there.
Reddit, on the other hand, went "dark". Millions of users couldn't use their favorite subreddits. And through word of mouth, many of us found the fediverse alternatives Lemmy and Kbin. But sadly (and also understandably, because they put a ton of work into them), many mods didn't link to these alternatives, in the hopes that Spez would change his mind. In a way, this is the reason why Lemmy and Kbin are not growing even faster.
After Elon and Rogen harassed a covid scientist today with a follower doxing and going to the scientist’s house, I’m not sure how long twitter has left. That lawsuit is going to bury shit fast.
Fucking Joe Rogen man. I keep trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. He seems like the sort of person who believes what the last person told him until someone tells him the opposite. But now it seems like he's becoming actually malicious.
There are about 5 years of my life on there, for some users 15+. Now, if you dropped your laptop with 15 years worth of memories on it, you damn sure would have hope you could still save the data, even if it's obviously done for.
I tried to use Reddit for a couple days ‘after’ the blackout, but finally just deleted it and came here. The subreddits protesting content-wise was really effective—it’s just not enjoyable to use anymore and (hopefully, I guess) only getting worse.
Other than that there are fewer people on it, what makes Mastodon less appealing? (I never really got into twitter so I'm not sure what the draw was there either). Curious to hear your thoughts as to why there still is hope for twitter?
Twitter just needs a year or two to go back to the way it was. It was the way it was because it was the best way to attract investors and advertisers which it the only way it can make money. And by the way it was I mean it was a hell site then to but not openly facist.
I think "hope" is a tricky word for it. A lot of people don't really care about the issues and a lot of people who use it sparingly for a quick "haha" won't really be affected (at least not yet). So those people may not really hope for more.
I still use reddit for my niche gaming communities and while the possibility of making federated alternatives for those communities exists, it's far simpler to stay.
Reddit will survive and thrive but that's not hope, it:s the opposite. The site is massive and sucks up all.yhe oxygen in the room, plus the majority of users don't care about API changes, they just want to scroll through some memes while having a crap.
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn't care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don't log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.